The Carpenter's Children by Maggie Bennett Read Free Book Online Page B

besides, he wanted to keep up his membership of both the Bible study group and the cycling club, though his weekends at home had curtailed any chance of a social life in Guildford. Jim Quayle, who also lodged at Mrs Green’s, had introduced Ernest to tennis which they practised on weekday evenings, and after a while Jim had invited two enthusiastic girls from the college to join them in mixed doubles. It soon became apparent that Jim had a fancy for one of the girls, and began to court her seriously; but when no similar attraction developed between Ernest and the other girl, the foursome had broken up, amicably enough, but leaving Ernest with a puzzling sense of loss. He and Jim had shared a lot in common, or so he’d thought, but this appeared to be the parting of their ways.
    For Isabel Munday life was more certain and much brighter. At fifteen she was leaving the post office to become Miss Daniells’ teaching assistant at the start of the summer term, and there she would remain for the next two years, before enrolling at a teachers’ training college. A sweet-faced girl with a genuine love of children, her parents regarded her with pride: Tom with quiet satisfaction, his wife farmore volubly, irritating the parents of other North Camp girls. Betty Goddard helped her father to keep the accounts at Thomas and Gibson’s, and was referred to as his secretary by her mother, and as a shopgirl by Mrs Munday. Phyllis Bird took over Isabel’s place in the post office, and Rosie Lansdowne assisted in her father’s dairy, with a view to enrolling as a nursing cadet at Everham Hospital the following year. Mary Cooper had moved into the Yeomans’ farmhouse to assist Mrs Yeomans who had surprised herself by having another baby at forty, and so needed more help in the house, especially at haymaking and harvesting, when hired labourers clumped into the stone-floored kitchen for bread, cheese and beer. And Eddie Cooper had astounded North Camp by marrying again, his new bride being Annie the barmaid at the Tradesmen’s Arms, a lady of about thirty who expertly drew pints for others but was herself teetotal. It soon became known that Mary and her stepmother did not get on, and this was borne out when the second Mrs Cooper produced a baby son, but Mary stayed on at the farm to help Mrs Yeomans with her new baby, also a boy. The older Yeomans children, two girls and a boy, were all working; the boy, now twenty, was his father’s right-hand man.
    Tom Munday was getting more demands on his skill than he could reasonably deal with, so took on another apprentice school-leaver who showed moreaptitude for carpentry than Ernest ever had. Tom and Eddie agreed that times were good and getting better for working men as wages rose and prices fell; Lady Neville’s confident prediction, and that of the MP, seemed to be justified, that Great Britain was surely marching forward to ever greater prosperity.
    And then suddenly in mid April came news of a terrible disaster, the shock-waves from which reverberated around the world. The great new passenger liner
Titanic
of the White Star line, alleged to be unsinkable, struck an iceberg in mid Atlantic on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, and had sunk with the loss of fifteen hundred lives. The news cast a shadow over every conversation, and there were those who asked why God should allow such loss of life on so great a scale. Mr Saville preached a sermon pointing out to his congregation that the liner’s wealthy passengers had been enjoying every luxury, drinking, dancing and playing cards when sudden death and destruction had come upon them, and he counselled his hearers to trust in the Lord’s justice, and give thanks for the survival of some seven hundred souls, rescued from the freezing cold sea by the liner
Carpathia
. It should give them all pause for thought, he warned, to review and perhaps renew their lives.
    Tom Munday, listening to this, was not so certain about the theology